Quote Originally Posted by Jag_Warrior
Fair questions.^^^

Without Jobs, will the Apple brand be degraded? And if so, how much? Will it become more of a commodity computer producer, like HP, Acer and Dell? Will AAPL begin trading at a 10 multiple instead of a 16? Open questions that only time can answer, I suppose. I've had a rather amazing ride with AAPL thus far, but when it's time to sell, I'll sell. I have no emotional attachment to stocks or companies when it comes to investing. Years ago, I shorted CART (MPH) as it began to swirl down, and I loved that racing series.
It's all very hit and miss. Things are on a knife edge. If the iPhone hadn't been a runaway success despite missing things like a camera and 3g which almost all other phones at the time had, then I think Apple would be down in the dumps now.

Buying an Apple product somehow seems to empower people to be able to hold it up in the air and say "This is the best <whatver> that I could buy!" even if it's missing quite crucial features that other phones have. That is of course the reason why Apple products have been so successful.

That said I think there are a lot of owners of Apple products who aren't so easily fooled. A friend on Facebook has an iPod, an iPad and iPhone but he will not buy a Mac because he's intelligent enough to know that it's just a fancy looking PC. He's a web designer too and considering his Apple purchases, you'd think he was a prime candidate for a Mac. He posted a status update on facebook saying his homebuilt PC had died and that he'd fixed it and someone started preaching about how Mac's never crashed He's very christian so there was no swearing but for an Apple fan he did slag Mac's off